People did lose money when left-pad was not available. Sure, it was only a day and the whole class of issue solved now, but there are other modes of attack.
And dev dependency bloat might be nonsensical to you but it's not nonsensical to me. Different people have different priorities, that's it.
So yeah, maybe you can afford not to care, but that doesn't mean you should give us that can't a hard time about it :)
I'm pretty sure then that if you actually knew what was inside your C compiler, you might lose your mind. There is something akin to an entire LISP inside gcc. And it uses its own host of deps, which themselves have deps... https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-devel/gcc/dependenc.... It's not like these compilers are large for no reason, there's definitely code in them.
What do you consider the preprocessor if not bloat? CMake or ninja or whatever Google's build system is, is that bloat?
Maybe you just haven't seen a fun enough pipeline. But the web is sufficiently complex that you need a sufficiently complex set of developer tools to build for it in an optimal way. You can try and skip steps there but you'll likely just end up reinventing what others have built.
If you know the leftpad class or issues is gone, why bring it up? Why not just start with the "other modes of attack"? Why do your priorities, whatever they are, matter?
I'm not the one giving others a hard time here, the people who maintain that it is fun and trendy to hate on a technology they think is "bloated" (whatever that means) are giving me the hard time.
And dev dependency bloat might be nonsensical to you but it's not nonsensical to me. Different people have different priorities, that's it.
So yeah, maybe you can afford not to care, but that doesn't mean you should give us that can't a hard time about it :)